A TELEPHONE customer is fuming after it took British Telecom more than two weeks to repair a fault on his phone line.

Businessman Mike Carlin, of Tilstone Bank, near Tarporley, accepted it was just an act of God when a lightning strike knocked out the phones in the neighbourhood.

But he grew impatient when BT kept apologising and promising to sort out the problem as the days went by. He needed the line to take bookings over the internet and his wife Elaine wanted to keep in contact with her parents.

Finally, Mr Carlin, 52,was reconnected on Saturday lunchtime - 16 days after the phone went off during an electrical storm.

He said: 'We are in Cheshire, we are not in the outer Hebrides. We are just 15 minutes from Chester. It's ridiculous. It's like living in the Third World.'

He added: 'I was talking to people at BT and all they were doing was apologising on virtually a daily basis saying it would be all right. It came on for about six hours last Wednesday but then went off again - which was just enough time for me to download 60 emails and not long enough to start replying to them. It's impossible to know how many bookings we have missed.

Mr Carlin, who also needs the phone because he is in the middle of buying a business, added 'My wife has two elderly parents. They don't live together and they are in their 80s. Mobiles phones are a bit iffy.'

Mr Carlin says that promised deadlines for repairs came and went and each time he had to ring to find out what was going on. 'They didn't phone me back,' he said. One excuse given for a delay was that the engineers were waiting to get hold of a hydraulic platform for working on overhead cables which he found laughable.

Mr Carlin said a BT operator told him Cheshire had been 'hit very badly' by the thunder storm. 'They said they were bringing engineers up from the South to help out,' said Mr Carlin, who explained that the elderly lady next door to him was also without a phone for two weeks.

Mr Carlin is now contemplating dumping BT as his telephone service provider. He knows he would still have to rely on BT lines but says this course of action would make him feel better.

A BT spokesman said a lightning strike had damaged an overhead cable affecting 20 lines. About 500 yards of overhead cable was replaced but there were still eight outstanding fault reports caused by secondary problems due to the lightning. Mr Carlin was among the last few customers to be reconnected.